arXiv subjects

Chao Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Chao Shen.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

RIS-aided D2D Communication Design for URLLC Packet Delivery

In this paper, we consider a smart factory scenario where a set of actuators receive critical control signals from an access point (AP) with reliability and low latency requirements. We investigate jointly active beamforming at the AP and passive phase shifting at the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) for successfully delivering the control signals from the AP to the actuators within a required time duration. The transmission follows a two-stage design. In the first stage, each actuator can both receive the direct signal from AP and the reflected signal from the RIS. In the second stage, the actuators with successful reception in the first stage, relay the message through the D2D network to the actuators with failed receptions. We formulate a non-convex optimization problem where we first obtain an equivalent but more tractable form by addressing the problem with discrete indicator functions. Then, Frobenius inner product based equality is applied for decoupling the optimization variables. Further, we adopt a penalty-based approach to resolve the rank-one constraints. Finally, we deal with the $\ell_0$-norm by $\ell_1$-norm approximation and add an extra term $\ell_1-\ell_2$ for sparsity. Numerical results reveal that the proposed two-stage RIS-aided D2D communication protocol is effective for enabling reliable communication with latency requirements.

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arXiv2021

Property Inference Attacks Against GANs

While machine learning (ML) has made tremendous progress during the past decade, recent research has shown that ML models are vulnerable to various security and privacy attacks. So far, most of the attacks in this field focus on discriminative models, represented by classifiers. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the security and privacy risks of generative models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs). In this paper, we propose the first set of training dataset property inference attacks against GANs. Concretely, the adversary aims to infer the macro-level training dataset property, i.e., the proportion of samples used to train a target GAN with respect to a certain attribute. A successful property inference attack can allow the adversary to gain extra knowledge of the target GAN's training dataset, thereby directly violating the intellectual property of the target model owner. Also, it can be used as a fairness auditor to check whether the target GAN is trained with a biased dataset. Besides, property inference can serve as a building block for other advanced attacks, such as membership inference. We propose a general attack pipeline that can be tailored to two attack scenarios, including the full black-box setting and partial black-box setting. For the latter, we introduce a novel optimization framework to increase the attack efficacy. Extensive experiments over four representative GAN models on five property inference tasks show that our attacks achieve strong performance. In addition, we show that our attacks can be used to enhance the performance of membership inference against GANs.

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arXiv2021

Optimal Operation of a Hydrogen-based Building Multi-Energy System Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Since hydrogen has many advantages (e.g., free pollution, extensive sources, convenient storage and transportation), hydrogen-based multi-energy systems (HMESs) have received wide attention. However, existing works on the optimal operation of HMESs neglect building thermal dynamics, which means that the flexibility of building thermal loads can not be utilized for reducing system operation cost. In this paper, we investigate an optimal operation problem of an HMES with the consideration of building thermal dynamics. Specifically, we first formulate an expected operational cost minimization problem related to an HMES. Due to the existence of uncertain parameters, inexplicit building thermal dynamics models, temporally coupled operational constraints related to three kinds of energy storage systems and indoor temperatures, as well as the coupling between electric energy subsystems and thermal energy subsystems, it is challenging to solve the formulated problem. To overcome the challenge, we reformulate the problem as a Markov game and propose an energy management algorithm to solve it based on multi-agent discrete actor-critic with rules (MADACR). Note that the proposed algorithm does not require any prior knowledge of uncertain parameters, parameter prediction, and explicit building thermal dynamics model. Simulation results based on real-world traces show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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arXiv2021

A Review of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Smart Building Energy Management

Global buildings account for about 30% of the total energy consumption and carbon emission, raising severe energy and environmental concerns. Therefore, it is significant and urgent to develop novel smart building energy management (SBEM) technologies for the advance of energy-efficient and green buildings. However, it is a nontrivial task due to the following challenges. Firstly, it is generally difficult to develop an explicit building thermal dynamics model that is both accurate and efficient enough for building control. Secondly, there are many uncertain system parameters (e.g., renewable generation output, outdoor temperature, and the number of occupants). Thirdly, there are many spatially and temporally coupled operational constraints. Fourthly, building energy optimization problems can not be solved in real-time by traditional methods when they have extremely large solution spaces. Fifthly, traditional building energy management methods have respective applicable premises, which means that they have low versatility when confronted with varying building environments. With the rapid development of Internet of Things technology and computation capability, artificial intelligence technology find its significant competence in control and optimization. As a general artificial intelligence technology, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is promising to address the above challenges. Notably, the recent years have seen the surge of DRL for SBEM. However, there lacks a systematic overview of different DRL methods for SBEM. To fill the gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review of DRL for SBEM from the perspective of system scale. In particular, we identify the existing unresolved issues and point out possible future research directions.

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arXiv2021

Covert Beamforming Design for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted IoT Networks

In this paper, we consider covert beamforming design for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where Alice utilizes IRS to covertly transmit a message to Bob without being recognized by Willie. We investigate the joint beamformer design of Alice and IRS to maximize the covert rate of Bob when the knowledge about Willie's channel state information (WCSI) is perfect and imperfect at Alice, respectively. For the former case, we develop a covert beamformer under the perfect covert constraint by applying semidefinite relaxation. For the later case, the optimal decision threshold of Willie is derived, and we analyze the false alarm and the missed detection probabilities. Furthermore, we utilize the property of Kullback-Leibler divergence to develop the robust beamformer based on a relaxation, S-Lemma and alternate iteration approach. Finally, the numerical experiments evaluate the performance of the proposed covert beamformer design and robust beamformer design.

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arXiv2021

Robust Symbol-Level Precoding and Passive Beamforming for IRS-Aided Communications

This paper investigates a joint beamforming design in a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication network aided with an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) panel. The symbol-level precoding (SLP) is adopted to enhance the system performance by exploiting the multiuser interference (MUI) with consideration of bounded channel uncertainty. The joint beamforming design is formulated into a nonconvex worst-case robust programming to minimize the transmit power subject to single-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirements. To address the challenges due to the constant modulus and the coupling of the beamformers, we first study the single-user case. Specifically, we propose and compare two algorithms based on the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and alternating optimization (AO) methods, respectively. It turns out that the AO-based algorithm has much lower computational complexity but with almost the same power to the SDR-based algorithm. Then, we apply the AO technique to the multiuser case and thereby develop an algorithm based on the proximal gradient descent (PGD) method. The algorithm can be generalized to the case of finite-resolution IRS and the scenario with direct links from the transmitter to the users. Numerical results show that the SLP can significantly improve the system performance. Meanwhile, 3-bit phase shifters can achieve near-optimal power performance.

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arXiv2021

Securing Face Liveness Detection Using Unforgeable Lip Motion Patterns

Face authentication usually utilizes deep learning models to verify users with high recognition accuracy. However, face authentication systems are vulnerable to various attacks that cheat the models by manipulating the digital counterparts of human faces. So far, lots of liveness detection schemes have been developed to prevent such attacks. Unfortunately, the attacker can still bypass these schemes by constructing wide-ranging sophisticated attacks. We study the security of existing face authentication services (e.g., Microsoft, Amazon, and Face++) and typical liveness detection approaches. Particularly, we develop a new type of attack, i.e., the low-cost 3D projection attack that projects manipulated face videos on a 3D face model, which can easily evade these face authentication services and liveness detection approaches. To this end, we propose FaceLip, a novel liveness detection scheme for face authentication, which utilizes unforgeable lip motion patterns built upon well-designed acoustic signals to enable a strong security guarantee. The unique lip motion patterns for each user are unforgeable because FaceLip verifies the patterns by capturing and analyzing the acoustic signals that are dynamically generated according to random challenges, which ensures that our signals for liveness detection cannot be manipulated. Specially, we develop robust algorithms for FaceLip to eliminate the impact of noisy signals in the environment and thus can accurately infer the lip motions at larger distances. We prototype FaceLip on off-the-shelf smartphones and conduct extensive experiments under different settings. Our evaluation with 44 participants validates the effectiveness and robustness of FaceLip.

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arXiv2021

CARTL: Cooperative Adversarially-Robust Transfer Learning

Transfer learning eases the burden of training a well-performed model from scratch, especially when training data is scarce and computation power is limited. In deep learning, a typical strategy for transfer learning is to freeze the early layers of a pre-trained model and fine-tune the rest of its layers on the target domain. Previous work focuses on the accuracy of the transferred model but neglects the transfer of adversarial robustness. In this work, we first show that transfer learning improves the accuracy on the target domain but degrades the inherited robustness of the target model. To address such a problem, we propose a novel cooperative adversarially-robust transfer learning (CARTL) by pre-training the model via feature distance minimization and fine-tuning the pre-trained model with non-expansive fine-tuning for target domain tasks. Empirical results show that CARTL improves the inherited robustness by about 28% at most compared with the baseline with the same degree of accuracy. Furthermore, we study the relationship between the batch normalization (BN) layers and the robustness in the context of transfer learning, and we reveal that freezing BN layers can further boost the robustness transfer.

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arXiv2021

Robust Resource Allocation for Multi-Antenna URLLC-OFDMA Systems in a Smart Factory

In this paper, we investigate the worst-case robust beamforming design and resource block (RB) assignment problem for total transmit power minimization of the central controller while guaranteeing each robot's transmission with target number of data bits and within required ultra-low latency and extremely high reliability. By using the property of the independence of each robot's beamformer design, we can obtain the equivalent power control design form of the original beamforming design. The binary RB mapping indicators are transformed into continuous ones with additional $\ell_0$-norm constraints to promote sparsity on each RB. A novel non-convex penalty (NCP) approach is applied to solve such $\ell_0$-norm constraints. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the NCP approach to the well-known reweighted $\ell_1$ method in terms of the optimized power consumption, convergence rate and robustness to channel realizations. Also, the impacts of latency, reliability, number of transmit antennas and channel uncertainty on the system performance are revealed.

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arXiv2021

Relay Selection and Resource Allocation for Ultra-Reliable Uplink Transmission in Smart Factory Scenarios

In this paper, a relay-aided two-phase transmission protocol for the smart factory scenario is proposed. This protocol aims at enabling all robots' ultra-reliable target number of uplink critical data transmission within a latency constraint by jointly optimizing the relay selection, resource block (RB) assignment, and transmit power allocation. Such protocol design is formulated as a mixed-integer and strictly non-convex problem where optimization variables are mutual coupling, which is definitely challenging. Instead of conventional methods designed for solving the problem, we leverage the properties of the relative entropy function to equivalently transform the problem without introducing extra constraints. As the packet error probability requirements of each robot under two possible transmission modes are coupled in one overall reliability constraint, the big-M technique is applied to decouple it into two corresponding reliability constraints. One is for direct transmission mode, and the other is for cooperative transmission mode. Moreover, both non-convex penalty (NCP) and quadratic penalty (QP) approaches are utilized to deal with the binary indicator constraints. Based on such penalty methods, a sequence of penalized approximated convex problems can be iteratively solved for sub-optimal solutions. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of such two penalty methods from the perspectives of sub-optimal values of total transmit power and convergence rate. Further, the impacts of reliability, the number and location of relays, the number of robots, the target number of data bits on the total power consumption are analyzed.

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arXiv2021

Infer-AVAE: An Attribute Inference Model Based on Adversarial Variational Autoencoder

User attributes, such as gender and education, face severe incompleteness in social networks. In order to make this kind of valuable data usable for downstream tasks like user profiling and personalized recommendation, attribute inference aims to infer users' missing attribute labels based on observed data. Recently, variational autoencoder (VAE), an end-to-end deep generative model, has shown promising performance by handling the problem in a semi-supervised way. However, VAEs can easily suffer from over-fitting and over-smoothing when applied to attribute inference. To be specific, VAE implemented with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) can only reconstruct input data but fail in inferring missing parts. While using the trending graph neural networks (GNNs) as encoder has the problem that GNNs aggregate redundant information from neighborhood and generate indistinguishable user representations, which is known as over-smoothing. In this paper, we propose an attribute \textbf{Infer}ence model based on \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{VAE} (Infer-AVAE) to cope with these issues. Specifically, to overcome over-smoothing, Infer-AVAE unifies MLP and GNNs in encoder to learn positive and negative latent representations respectively. Meanwhile, an adversarial network is trained to distinguish the two representations and GNNs are trained to aggregate less noise for more robust representations through adversarial training. Finally, to relieve over-fitting, mutual information constraint is introduced as a regularizer for decoder, so that it can make better use of auxiliary information in representations and generate outputs not limited by observations. We evaluate our model on 4 real-world social network datasets, experimental results demonstrate that our model averagely outperforms baselines by 7.0$\%$ in accuracy.

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arXiv2020

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Smart Grid Protection Against Coordinated Multistage Transmission Line Attacks

With the increase of connectivity in power grid, a cascading failure may be triggered by the failure of a transmission line, which can lead to substantial economic losses and serious negative social impacts. Therefore, it is very important to identify the critical lines under various types of attacks that may initiate a cascading failure and deploy defense resources to protect them. Since coordinated multistage line attacks can lead to larger negative impacts compared with a single-stage attack or a multistage attack without coordination, this paper intends to identify the critical lines under coordinated multistage attacks that may initiate a cascading failure and deploy limited defense resources optimally. To this end, we first formulate a total generation loss maximization problem with the consideration of multiple attackers and multiple stages. Due to the large size of solution space, it is very challenging to solve the formulated problem. To overcome the challenge, we reformulate the problem as a Markov game and design its components, e.g., state, action, and reward. Next, we propose a scalable algorithm to solve the Markov game based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and prioritized experience replay, which can determine the optimal attacking line sequences. Then, we design a defense strategy to decide the optimal defense line set. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the designed defense strategy.

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arXiv2020

A Fast and Scalable Authentication Scheme in IoT for Smart Living

Numerous resource-limited smart objects (SOs) such as sensors and actuators have been widely deployed in smart environments, opening new attack surfaces to intruders. The severe security flaw discourages the adoption of the Internet of things in smart living. In this paper, we leverage fog computing and microservice to push certificate authority (CA) functions to the proximity of data sources. Through which, we can minimize attack surfaces and authentication latency, and result in a fast and scalable scheme in authenticating a large volume of resource-limited devices. Then, we design lightweight protocols to implement the scheme, where both a high level of security and low computation workloads on SO (no bilinear pairing requirement on the client-side) is accomplished. Evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our scheme in handling authentication and registration for a large number of nodes, meanwhile protecting them against various threats to smart living. Finally, we showcase the success of computing intelligence movement towards data sources in handling complicated services.

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arXiv2020

Learning by Sampling and Compressing: Efficient Graph Representation Learning with Extremely Limited Annotations

Graph convolution network (GCN) attracts intensive research interest with broad applications. While existing work mainly focused on designing novel GCN architectures for better performance, few of them studied a practical yet challenging problem: How to learn GCNs from data with extremely limited annotation? In this paper, we propose a new learning method by sampling strategy and model compression to overcome this challenge. Our approach has multifold advantages: 1) the adaptive sampling strategy largely suppresses the GCN training deviation over uniform sampling; 2) compressed GCN-based methods with a smaller scale of parameters need fewer labeled data to train; 3) the smaller scale of training data is beneficial to reduce the human resource cost to label them. We choose six popular GCN baselines and conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The results show that by applying our method, all GCN baselines cut down the annotation requirement by as much as 90$\%$ and compress the scale of parameters more than 6$\times$ without sacrificing their strong performance. It verifies that the training method could extend the existing semi-supervised GCN-based methods to the scenarios with the extremely small scale of labeled data.

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arXiv2020

Optimal Resource Allocation for Delay Minimization in NOMA-MEC Networks

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) can enhance the computing capability of mobile devices, while non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can provide high data rates. Combining these two strategies can effectively benefit the network with spectrum and energy efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the task delay minimization in multi-user NOMA-MEC networks, where multiple users can offload their tasks simultaneously through the same frequency band. We adopt the partial offloading policy, in which each user can partition its computation task into offloading and locally computing parts. We aim to minimize the task delay among users by optimizing their tasks partition ratios and offloading transmit power. The delay minimization problem is first formulated, and it is shown that it is a nonconvex one. By carefully investigating its structure, we transform the original problem into an equivalent quasi-convex. In this way, a bisection search iterative algorithm is proposed in order to achieve the minimum task delay. To reduce the complexity of the proposed algorithm and evaluate its optimality, we further derive closed-form expressions for the optimal task partition ratio and offloading power for the case of two-user NOMA-MEC networks. Simulations demonstrate the convergence and optimality of the proposed algorithm and the effectiveness of the closed-form analysis.

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arXiv2020

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for HVAC Control in Commercial Buildings

In commercial buildings, about 40%-50% of the total electricity consumption is attributed to Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, which places an economic burden on building operators. In this paper, we intend to minimize the energy cost of an HVAC system in a multi-zone commercial building under dynamic pricing with the consideration of random zone occupancy, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality comfort. Due to the existence of unknown thermal dynamics models, parameter uncertainties (e.g., outdoor temperature, electricity price, and number of occupants), spatially and temporally coupled constraints associated with indoor temperature and CO2 concentration, a large discrete solution space, and a non-convex and non-separable objective function, it is very challenging to achieve the above aim. To this end, the above energy cost minimization problem is reformulated as a Markov game. Then, an HVAC control algorithm is proposed to solve the Markov game based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning with attention mechanism. The proposed algorithm does not require any prior knowledge of uncertain parameters and can operate without knowing building thermal dynamics models. Simulation results based on real-world traces show the effectiveness, robustness and scalability of the proposed algorithm.

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arXiv2020

Optimizing Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Convolutional Neural Network Predictions

Convolutional neural network is a machine-learning model widely applied in various prediction tasks, such as computer vision and medical image analysis. Their great predictive power requires extensive computation, which encourages model owners to host the prediction service in a cloud platform. Recent researches focus on the privacy of the query and results, but they do not provide model privacy against the model-hosting server and may leak partial information about the results. Some of them further require frequent interactions with the querier or heavy computation overheads, which discourages querier from using the prediction service. This paper proposes a new scheme for privacy-preserving neural network prediction in the outsourced setting, i.e., the server cannot learn the query, (intermediate) results, and the model. Similar to SecureML (S&P'17), a representative work that provides model privacy, we leverage two non-colluding servers with secret sharing and triplet generation to minimize the usage of heavyweight cryptography. Further, we adopt asynchronous computation to improve the throughput, and design garbled circuits for the non-polynomial activation function to keep the same accuracy as the underlying network (instead of approximating it). Our experiments on MNIST dataset show that our scheme achieves an average of 122x, 14.63x, and 36.69x reduction in latency compared to SecureML, MiniONN (CCS'17), and EzPC (EuroS&P'19), respectively. For the communication costs, our scheme outperforms SecureML by 1.09x, MiniONN by 36.69x, and EzPC by 31.32x on average. On the CIFAR dataset, our scheme achieves a lower latency by a factor of 7.14x and 3.48x compared to MiniONN and EzPC, respectively. Our scheme also provides 13.88x and 77.46x lower communication costs than MiniONN and EzPC on the CIFAR dataset.

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arXiv2020

Shielding Collaborative Learning: Mitigating Poisoning Attacks through Client-Side Detection

Collaborative learning allows multiple clients to train a joint model without sharing their data with each other. Each client performs training locally and then submits the model updates to a central server for aggregation. Since the server has no visibility into the process of generating the updates, collaborative learning is vulnerable to poisoning attacks where a malicious client can generate a poisoned update to introduce backdoor functionality to the joint model. The existing solutions for detecting poisoned updates, however, fail to defend against the recently proposed attacks, especially in the non-IID setting. In this paper, we present a novel defense scheme to detect anomalous updates in both IID and non-IID settings. Our key idea is to realize client-side cross-validation, where each update is evaluated over other clients' local data. The server will adjust the weights of the updates based on the evaluation results when performing aggregation. To adapt to the unbalanced distribution of data in the non-IID setting, a dynamic client allocation mechanism is designed to assign detection tasks to the most suitable clients. During the detection process, we also protect the client-level privacy to prevent malicious clients from stealing the training data of other clients, by integrating differential privacy with our design without degrading the detection performance. Our experimental evaluations on two real-world datasets show that our scheme is significantly robust to two representative poisoning attacks.

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